Mrs. Emerson sighed again faintly, while her eyes dropped from the
face of her visitor and sunk to the floor. A shadow was falling on
her spirit--a weight coming down with a gradually increasing
pressure upon her heart. She remembered the night of her return from
Ivy Cliff and the language then used by her husband on this very
subject, which was mainly in agreement with the range of opinions
attributed to him by Mrs. Talbot.
"Marriage, to a spirited woman," she remarked, in a pensive
undertone, "is a doubtful experiment."
"Always," returned her friend. "As woman stands now in the estimate
of man, her chances for happiness are almost wholly on the side of
old-maidism. Still, freedom is the price of struggle and combat; and
woman will first have to show, in actual strife, that she is the
equal of her present lord."
"Then you would turn every home into a battlefield?" said Mrs.
Emerson.
"Every home in which there is a tyrant and an oppressor," was the
prompt answer. "Many fair lands, in all ages, have been trampled
down ruthlessly by the iron feet of war; and that were better, as
the price of freedom, than slavery."
Irene sighed again, and was again silent.
"What," she asked, "if the oppressor is so much stronger than the
oppressed that successful resistance is impossible? that with every
struggle the links of the chain that binds her sink deeper into her
quivering flesh?"
"Every age and every land have seen noble martyrs in the cause of
freedom. It is better to die for liberty than live an ignoble
slave," answered the tempter.
"And I will die a free woman." This Irene said in her heart.